from the urls-we-dig-up dept

With Halloween upon us, some of you might be hiding out with the lights off to keep kids begging for candy off your front lawn. Or you might be generously handing out full-size chocolate bars instead of those "fun size" candy bars that aren't really that much fun at all. Either way, if you like candy, you might be replenishing your supply on the cheap soon.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Plenty of folks like chocolate, so it makes some sense to try to make chocolate ever so slightly more healthy (as long as the taste isn't horribly affected). If you're going to binge on chocolate in the near future, you might want to check out a few of these links to help rationalize your chocolate consumption.

from the crush-this dept

We already discussed how King.com, makers of the massively popular Candy Crush Saga mobile game, have applied for a trademark on the word "candy" and have begun sending out the threat letters. Well, because one generic turn deserves another, the game developer did likewise with the word "saga", another term that a simple search of the Android market reveals is generic and widespread. But that hasn't stopped King.com from going after all those "saga" pilferers out there, heroically attempting to keep customers from being confused.

Like those that might confuse Candy Crush Saga, a game in which you slap fruit around for no apparent reason, and The Banner Saga, which is a turn-based strategy game with heavy role-playing elements that might as well have been designed with the goal of being as unlike Candy Crush as possible. King.comis filing an opposition to a trademark request by Stoic, LLC, makers of The Banner Saga, who have applied for the actually sensible trademark on the entire name of their game. That opposition alleges, amongst other things, that the word "saga" and the name The Banner Saga are "deceptively similar" and will cause consumers to "believe that Applicant's goods originate from the Opposer, resulting in a likelihood of confusion."

That, my friends, is a special level of bullshit. To take the application of one generic term and claim deception by producers who actually make a game with a unique title would be akin to Major League Baseball seeking to keep little league baseball from using the name of the sport because someone might confuse the two enterprises. It ain't gonna happen.

"We do not have any concerns that Banner Saga is trying build on our brand or our content," a spokesperson for King, the makers of Candy Crush Saga, told Kotaku. "However, like any prudent company, we need to take all appropriate steps to protect our IP, both now and in the future."

Ah, the grand old trademark Nuremberg Defense: it's not our fault we're acting this way, trademark law made us do it. Except, of course, that isn't true. There are a myriad of ways in which to wade these waters and come to an agreement that don't involve sending out threat letters to innocent content producers. Those ways probably don't even need to come into play, however, in a case where the trademark on a single generic word never should have been granted and the overlap in the market between the two marks is so thin all the other trademark disputes are worried it might have anorexia.

Two years ago, the three of us at Stoic set out to make an epic viking game: The Banner Saga. We did, and people loved it, so we're making another one. We won't make a viking saga without the word Saga, and we don't appreciate anyone telling us we can't. King.com claims they're not attempting to prevent us from using The Banner Saga, and yet their legal opposition to our trademark filing remains. We're humbled by the outpouring of support and honored to have others stand with us for the right to their own Saga. We just want to make great games.

That kind of sentiment is going to gain them a great deal of goodwill. King.com, on the other hand, having tried to associate their generic trademarks with a quality and enjoyable product, are instead associating their company name with legal yahoo-ism and attempts to shut down other people's fun. Way to think this through, guys!

from the gonna-be-a-busy-day dept

Candy Crush is the mobile game that finally got everyone to stop playing scrabble and pictionary with their friends during their morning commutes. It was developed by King.com. King.com then turned around and applied for a trademark on the word "candy" (for games and a variety of merchandise) and is now going completely bonkers in the mobile app space, sending out letters to any app on the market that includes that oh-so-unique identifier of a word.

Stories about legal threats over generic terms are a dime a dozen, but at least those fights tend to be over generic phrases or groups of words. Having a trademark in the mobile app space on "candy" is insane. But that doesn't mean some folks can't have some fun with it. Take the indie game makers who have started The Candy Jam, for instance, which is simply a game that requires players to create any sort of game that has to do with candy.

WHY? BECAUSE TRADEMARKING COMMON WORDS IS RIDICULOUS AND BECAUSE IT GIVES US AN OCCASION TO MAKE ANOTHER GAMEJAM :D

RULES: MAKE A GAME INVOLVING CANDIES CONSIDER USING THE WORD "CANDY" SEVERAL TIMES, ALSO "SCROLL", "MEMORY", "SAGA", "APPLE" AND "EDGE" MIGHT GIVE BONUS POINTS

Well, okay then. If an insidious game developer wants to go legal on a generic word, apparently some folks out there will give them all the generic word targets they can handle. The apparent leading game idea thus far, judging by the Candy Jam hashtag on Twitter, is an inventive romp called Candy Candy Candy. We've reached troll level three, apparently.

The good news, however, is that even the lawyers think this is silly.

IP lawyer Martin Schwimmer tells Gamezebo that the fact "candy" is such a ubiquitous term will make it hard for much to legally stick.

"Someone can't plausibly claim that they came up with the term TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES on their own", he says. "An incredibly unique trademark like that is somewhat easy to protect. Suggestive marks are protectable, but the problem is that third parties can claim that they thought up their mark on their own."

And yet many people may simply change the names of their games to avoid trouble, or else find themselves in a court of law having to defend the name of their game including a word that's about as common as it gets. Yay, trademark!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The urban legend about poisoned candy on Halloween has pushed parents away from handing out home-made treats -- even though the realistic odds of finding dangerous treats is vanishingly small. Still, there are some crazy people out there, so maybe it's better safe than sorry. Just know that getting hit by a car while crossing the street is a far more frequent occurrence on Halloween....

from the sweet-feet? dept

Trademark is one of the few intellectual property laws left that I think generally serves its original purpose. For the uninitiated, trademark was originally created to avoid customer confusion over branding, thus keeping the buyer from deceit and harm at the vicious hands of fake goods. And, while trademarks can be abused, such as when Nintendo trademarked a phrase it didn't coin for publicity purposes, their existence hovers on the border of benign.

Enter Tootsie Roll, the popular candy product that made a name for itself by being thrown at you in every holiday parade you ever attended. They've decided to take bold action against two ladies selling shoes, which they cleverly named Footzyrolls. Via CNN:

"According to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Illinois, Rollashoe, which makes rollable ballet slippers called Footzyrolls, is infringing on the brand name of Chicago-based Tootsie Roll. Tootsie Roll, which made $521 million in sales last year, alleged that the $2 million Footzyrolls brand will confuse and "deceive" consumers into thinking that the shoes are associated with Tootsie Roll's portfolio of products."

Now, in fairness to Tootsie Roll, I can't tell you how many times I went searching in my house for a tasty treat and ended up gnawing on my shoes. Wait...no, that was the dog, who I happen to have named "Moron In A Hurry". Actually, I'm having trouble wondering how either of these companies is in each other's industry stratosphere. Footzyrolls are ballet slippers and a quick perusal of the Tootsie Roll site offers nothing in the way of footwear. And really, who outside of the New York Jets coaching staff is going to think feet are a sweet treat to be munched upon?

In all, this smacks of a legal department with a tad too much time on its hands, particularly with Tootsie Roll requesting "damages" be paid by the startup footwear company. Rollashoe is fighting back, though the company's lawyer notes the collateral damage:

"'Tootsie Roll is flexing its muscle. This case could now proceed for another year. It will cost the Caplans a lot of money. It could kill their business,' he said."

And thank God for that, for what a pitiful sight it would make to walk down the street and see morons hurrying everywhere, chewing not on the chocolate goodness that is a Tootsie Roll, but on the soles of their sneakers instead.

from the you-put-your-chocolate-in-my-trademark-lawyer dept

A ton of people have been submitting variations on this story of how candy company Hershey is suing candy company Mars, claiming that Mars' new Dove brand of chocolate and peanut butter candies has packaging that looks too much like Hershey's Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Most of the stories I saw didn't have any actual images to show, but the link here has the following two images:

And, similar to the recent legal spat we covered concerning beer cans, the wrappers look like they have two totally different designs. Given both of these cases happened in such close proximity, it does make you wonder if consumer goods companies are getting much more aggressive in trying to claim any package that has some incredibly superficial similarities now represents trademark infringement.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, Hershey's has a couple of newer packages that do appear a bit more similar, but still pretty different:

from the check-the-wrappers dept

When I moved into my current home a few years back, I discovered (a few weeks later) on Halloween that one of my neighbors is a professional choclatier, when a pair of insanely delicious home-made caramel candy apples were delivered to my house as a "reverse trick-or-treat." It was definitely a nice "welcome to the neighborhood" moment. However, even though I knew I could trust these apples, it immediately brought me back to when I was a kid, when there were all these big scary news stories about people poisoning candy and putting razors in caramel candy apples for neighborhood trick-or-treaters. I remember my parents followed the evening news' recommendations of immediately taking the bags of candy we came home with and to spread them out on the kitchen table to go through them looking for exposed candy or loose wrappers to dump in the garbage. It was serious business. These days, many places are so worried about the scary poisoning/razor-blading neighbors that they've officially tried to move trick-or-treating to local businesses away from residences.

I'd never really thought much about the scare stories and whether or not they true. When I was a kid, I assumed of course they were true. It was being reported on the news, and I think my school sent home paper warnings as well. How could it not be true? However, Samira Kawash, who is apparently an expert in "candy," is writing a series of posts about Halloween, and one of them notes that the whole story of poisoned/razor-bladed Halloween candy from sadistic neighbors is almost entirely a myth. The number of children really harmed by such things? "Approximately zero."

It turns out that the Halloween sadist is about 1 percent fact and 99 percent myth. One California dentist in 1959 did pass out candy-coated laxatives, and some kids got bad stomachaches. But instances over the past 40 years where children were allegedly harmed by tainted candy have invariably fallen apart under scrutiny. In some cases, there was evidence that someone (a family member) was attempting to harm a particular child under cover of Halloween. In other cases, poisoning which had another cause was misattributed to candy. Not surprisingly, the myth created its own reality: As the stories of Halloween tampering spread, some kids got the idea of faking tampering as a sort of prank. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the myth persists.

Of course, in retrospect, this makes sense. We see stories all the time these days of the press (and sometimes groups of parents) creating a moral panic around some dubious piece of information about "harm to children" that never seems to stand up to any serious scrutiny. But, as Kawash notes, "the myth persists." And, while they may not be the reason the myth started or persisted, the main beneficiaries of the myth were the big candy companies, who actually have been linked to health problems at industrial food processing plants:

Wrappers are like candy condoms: Safe candy is candy that is covered and sealed. And not just any wrapper will do. Loose, casual, cheap wrappers, the kind of wrappers one might find on locally produced candies or non-brand-name candies, are also liable to send candy to Halloween purgatory. The close, tight factory wrapper says "sealed for your protection." And the recognized brand name on the wrapper also lends a reassuring aura of corporate responsibility and accountability. It's a basic axiom of consumer faith: The bigger the brand, the safer the candy.

Ironic, since we know that the most serious food dangers are those that originate from just the kind of large-scale industrial food processing environments that also bring us name-brand, mass-market candies. Salmonella, E. coli, and their bacterial buddies lurking in bagged salads and pre-formed hamburger patties are real food dangers; home-made cookies laced with ground glass are not.

Kawash notes that all of this has come at the cost of good, home-made treats, which actually may have been safer for kids. So, as we hit Halloween weekend, I'm sure you'll have plenty of opportunities for eating processed candy options, but perhaps it's time to put an end to the old myth.

from the mike-&-ikes dept

The story of the school district that supposedly spied on some students keeps getting odder and odder. While the school district claims that it used the secret remote webcam activation technology 42 times -- and only to track down stolen or lost laptops -- it still hasn't explained why this particular student was punished. He claims his laptop was not stolen and there was no reason to turn it on. The school claims that the assistant principal who supposedly confronted the student with an image from the webcam is being unfairly tarnished.

But here's where it gets even odder. Apparently, the "improper act" that the student was disciplined for was an accusation of either drug use or drug selling. For what? Well, the image showed the student with Mike & Ikes candies, which do have a passing resemblance to pills, but (last we checked) do not appear to be controlled substances.

Now, there certainly could be more to this story, but the school has not done a particularly good job explaining its side of things.